The silence after Stillwater was a different creature. It was the quiet of exhaustion, of wounds licked in private, of a world too tired to make noise. Kaelen and Lyssa moved through it like survivors of a storm, the memory of the Chorus's silver-lit eyes and the psychic cacophony of their awakening a fresh scar on their souls.
They followed an old hunter's trail, skirting the worst of the blighted lands. The spring sun was warm, but a persistent chill clung to the shadows, a leftover breath of the Gentle Dark. Lyssa had spoken little since they'd watched Arden vanish into the northern woods. She rode with a new stillness, but it wasn't the placid emptiness of the converted. It was the quiet of deep water, of thoughts churning beneath a calm surface.
On the afternoon of the second day, they came across a river swollen with meltwater. The usual ford was a raging, chest-high torrent. The bridge, a simple affair of rope and wood, had been washed away, only frayed ends dangling from stone pylons.
"We'll have to go around," Kaelen said, surveying the churning water with a soldier's practicality. "Adds half a day, maybe more."
Lyssa didn't answer. She'd dismounted and walked to the river's edge, staring at the water as if it held a secret. Her brow was furrowed.
"Lyssa?"
"It's afraid," she murmured, so softly he almost didn't hear.
"What?"
"The water," she said, not looking at him. "It's… confused. It wants to go to the sea, but the path is too fast, too loud. The stones are angry at being pushed."
Kaelen stared at her. It was the kind of poetic, nonsensical thing a child or a mystic might say. But her voice held no whimsy. It was flat, observational. A statement of fact.
Before he could respond, she knelt, took off her gloves, and placed her bare palms flat on a large, dry rock at the water's edge. She closed her eyes.
Nothing happened for a long moment. Then Kaelen felt it—a change in the air. Not a wind, but a shift in pressure. The furious roar of the river seemed to… lessen. Not in volume, but in intent. He looked at the torrent and blinked. It was an illusion, surely. But no—the white-capped rage directly in front of her rock seemed to smooth out, the current slowing, parting around the stone like a respectful bow. A calm, clear channel of deep water, impossibly, formed itself between the banks.
"By the Saint," Kaelen breathed, his hand going to the hilt of his sword out of pure instinct.
Lyssa opened her eyes. They weren't silver-lit like the Chorus. They were her own clear grey, but for a fleeting second, Kaelen saw the ghost of river-currents swirling in their depths. She looked at the calm channel, then at her hands, with an expression of dawning, terrified awe.
"I… I just asked it to be still for a moment," she whispered.
The effort, or the shock, seemed to hit her. She swayed, her face paling. The moment her focus broke, the river snarled back to life, the calm channel vanishing as if it had never been, the water crashing against the rock with renewed fury.
Kaelen was at her side in two strides, catching her elbow as she stumbled back. "Easy. What was that?"
"I don't know," she said, her breath coming fast. "I've always… felt things. In the quarry, I could tell where a vein of stone was weak by the… the song of it. I thought it was just imagination. A quarry rat's intuition." She looked up at him, her eyes wide. "But that… that was outside of me."
Elemental attunement. Kaelen knew of it. The Royal Archivist in Saltmire could coax a little more warmth from a fire. One of his own lieutenants had an uncanny knack for predicting storms. But those were faint, passive sensitivities—a nudge, a whisper. What he had just witnessed was a conversation. A command, heeded.
Mages of true power were legends from before the Unmaking. The stories said they could wield one element, shaping fire or calling wind. The greatest heroes of song, like Arden's companion Elara the Dawn-Singer, were said to have mastered two—a feat of near-mythic rarity.
Elara. The name was a thunderclap in his mind. The stories were fragmented, shrouded in the trauma of the war and her tragic end, but one truth was etched in legend: Elara, a mage of the original hero's party, as well as Arden's former lover, was the only known Quadra-Elemental in recorded history. She had commanded earth, water, fire, and air in a harmony so profound it was said she could sing the dawn itself into being. It was the foundation of her myth, the source of her power, and the reason her fall was so cataclysmic, and why she was able to go to the lengths that she did.
And this quarry girl from the hinterlands had just spoken to water as a friend. She heard the song of stone. In the quarry, her defiance had been a fire nothing could smother.
Three. She had demonstrated three.
Kaelen's blood ran cold, then hot with a staggering realization. He wasn't looking at a girl with a rare gift. He was looking at a ghost. A living echo of a legend everyone believed was extinct. A Quadra-Elemental.
The Gentle Dark sought silence, erasure, the smoothing away of complexity. It turned vibrant forests into still-life gardens and spirited people into placid husks.
What was Lyssa, if not the absolute pinnacle of complexity? A soul naturally attuned to the fundamental, chaotic symphony of the world itself. She wasn't just a survivor. She was the living antithesis of everything the cult stood for. A natural-born symphony in a world the enemy wanted to mute. And if the legends were true, her potential was limitless… and infinitely dangerous.
"You can't tell anyone," he said, his voice low and urgent, his grip on her arm tightening. "Do you understand? No one. Not until we know more. Not until you understand it yourself."
The fear in her eyes was joined by a spark of that familiar defiance. "What is it? What am I?"
"You are something that hasn't been seen since the Dawn-Singer walked these lands," Kaelen said, the words feeling sacrilegious to speak aloud. "And that makes you the most valuable, and the most hunted, person on this continent."
He thought of the Speaker's void-eyes, cold and hungry. A creature like that would see Lyssa not as a person, but as a roaring bonfire of heresy that needed to be extinguished. He thought of kings and councils, who would see her as a weapon to be controlled. He thought of Arden, whose greatest love had been a Quadra-Elemental, and whose greatest tragedy had been her loss. What would such a sight do to the already broken Warden?
He helped her back onto her horse, his touch lingering, protective. The rest of the day's ride was spent in a new, thunderous silence. He watched her differently now. Every time her gaze lingered on a stand of trees, he wondered if she heard the slow, patient song of the wood. When she cupped her hands to drink from a stream, he watched for a tremor. He was guarding a miracle, and the weight of history threatened to crush him.
That night, at their camp, the tension broke in an unexpected way. Kaelen was struggling to get a fire going with damp tinder,